Saturday, May 7, 2011

In our community development work we come across hundreds of good developers. Those developers rarely agree on anything. They ceaselessly debate the merits of Test Driven Development. They argue about why C# is better than Java, or Ruby, or VB. They relentlessly pontificate about the future of Cloud computing.

They all agree on 1 thing: “Use Source Control”

… Of course which source control is still up for debate.

What continues to confuse us is the lack of source control adoption in the wider development community. If everyone at every conference is pro-source control, why are there shops without it? It seems to us the reason these shops exist is because their developers are never interacting with the greater development community. They are living in a bubble. Does this mean they can’t be good developers? YES!

Our industry moves incredibly fast. To be a professional, you need to be constantly learning and collaborating with others.

The reason why source control is a universally accepted best practice is because it enables us to change code without fear, to experiment, and allows multiple developers to work on the same code base.

If your developers are not using source control; Fire Them! If this most basic of practices is not being followed, you have hundreds more problems in your code base that are much harder to detect and fix. You have hired a programmer that is not a professional, and does not intend to become one.